Brothers (and Me)

by Donna Britt

  But surely I’d evolved more than the letters suggested. I asked my best source—Mom—what I was like as a girl. The World’s Bluntest Woman jumped right in: with my perfectionism.

  “Everything had to be right,” Mom began, citing a favorite tale of hers in which I defied her at age seven by cutting my hair and hiding it behind the fridge. “But your bangs were perfect,” she admitted.

  “Being the only girl didn’t faze you a bit,” Mom went on. “You were a girlie girl, into clothes and combing dolls’ hair…. You asked lots of questions, wanted to know what things meant. And you were very independent. Darrell and Bruce didn’t want me out of their sight, but you, you were fine on your own. And you had this deep sense of right and wrong; I never had trouble disciplining you.”

  She paused for breath. “If there was a leader in the house, it was you…. You acted like a little mother.”

  Listening, I tallied: Maternal? Check. Independent? Check. Wants everything—my house, my family, my hair—just right? Check. A justice-obsessed girlie girl who asks endless questions, takes the lead, and keeps herself in line? How many checks is that?

  I’d barely changed. But why hadn’t Mom mentioned my giving? She thought about it.

  “The only child I remember as extremely giving was Bruce,” she said. “He’d ask, ‘Mom, is there anything I can do for you?’… I don’t know when you became that way.”

  When I whispered, “After Darrell died?” Mom didn’t hesitate.

  “Of all my kids, you were the most affected,” she said. “His death changed all of our lives, but you’re the one who was… obliterated. I had no idea of the bond between you two.”

  For decades, I, too, had underestimated that bond—and I was still doing it. I realized this a few weeks later while sitting on the couch in Hamani’s Los Angeles apartment, the one Darrell would soon be leaving our Maryland home to move into. We’d all flown to L.A. to visit Mani and see the place he’d be sharing with his little brother. When everyone left to get breakfast, I stayed behind. Glum and alone, I contemplated the rooms that would soon house my departing middle child. Mute tears slid down my cheeks.

  Darrell’s key in the door shook me out of my reverie. Turning away, I tried to hide my damp face. No luck. Plopping beside me, Darrell pressed me about what was wrong.

  “You’re moving so far away, and I can’t protect you,” I finally admitted, trying to gather myself. “First Mani left, now you. I keep thinking about what happened to my brother when he left home.”

  Suddenly I was sobbing. “I failed him,” I gasped, as shocked by my words as by my tears. “He left, and I couldn’t protect him.”

  The son whom I’d spent the most time consoling, scolding, reassuring, and tearing into patted my shoulder.

  “Everything you wanted to put into your brother, you put into me,” he began. “Everything you didn’t get to tell him before he died, you’ve said to me, Mani, and Skye. But you can’t be responsible for what happens to us. If I walked out of here tonight and got hit by a bus, I would leave this earth knowing that you loved me completely. And you would know I loved you completely.

  “That’s the best you can do, Mom,” Darrell said. “We have to be responsible for ourselves.”

  Everything, it seemed, was tied up in the brother whose name I went months without uttering, whose face I sometimes struggled to recall. Day after day, his loss still haunted me.

  Darrell was right. Loving him, his brothers, and others in my life as fully and demonstrably as possible was the best I could do. I couldn’t be responsible for him, live his life, shield him in every instance. I had to let him—as well as the man I’d named him for—go. It was time.

  Yet I still felt restive. Unsatisfied. Certain there was something I’d missed.

  A month later, I was yakking over dinner with Mireille at an Indian restaurant when I interrupted our chat to address our hugely pregnant waitress. “When are you due?” I asked the server, smiling. “Next month,” she said, disappearing with our plates.

  Now, Mireille had seen me engage strangers often enough to joke that no maitre d’ or manicurist was safe from my probing. Yet this time she looked puzzled and asked, “Why did you do that?”

  Surprised, I shrugged. “Because I didn’t want the waitress to feel like she didn’t matter to us,” I said. Still looking confused, Mireille asked why I needed to send that message.

  “Because I wanted her to know I saw her, not just her job or status,” I snapped. Now I was puzzled. “Why?”

  Mireille leaned in, her voice gentle. “These acknowledgments you give people… is it possible they have something to do with your brother?”

  Her words felt like a slap. The answer—to her question and the one I’d been futilely asking myself—was embarrassing in its obviousness. Yet for a moment, I couldn’t speak.

  “The men who shot him didn’t see him,” I finally said, my voice unsteady. “He asked for help, but all they saw was an image based on how he looked…. I don’t want to be like that with anyone.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I want people to know that I see them,” I told her. “What they need.”

  Something cracked open inside me. The realization that emerged felt concrete and true. Halting my giving, I knew in this fathomless place, would dishonor Darrell. Failing to acknowledge anyone’s humanity would make me as blind as the men whose sightlessness had stolen him from me. Why hadn’t I seen it?

  I’d known on the couch that long-ago day that I felt culpable in Darrell’s death, and that the feeling had kindled a protectiveness and generosity toward other black men. But the truth was much deeper. It wasn’t just black men, or men period, whom I felt driven to recognize. It was everyone—Asian bank tellers, female appliance repair people, tollbooth ticket takers of every stripe. I didn’t need to know their stories to know they deserved to be seen, heard, acknowledged, as Darrell had deserved it. Not seeing, not responding, was unthinkable.

  Thirty years earlier, two cops had seen the strange-behaving guy in the ditch only clearly enough to kill him. They saw nothing that prompted them to talk him through his crisis, wrestle him to the ground, or just give him what he’d requested: a ride home. As long as I lived, I’d be making up for their mistake. For decades, I had prided myself on my insight, on my ability to cut through tangled emotional thickets to get to the heart of things. And the most transparent directives of my own heart had eluded me.

  Feeling responsible for my sons, my husband, for all black men, hadn’t been enough. I was shouldering the whole world. How could I live and not give when everyone with a need represented my brother? When each offering was actually a gift to him?

  And I knew this: Though I would be more careful about whom I offered myself to (everyone wasn’t my brother, after all), I would never stop wanting to bolster, reassure, prop up, fix plates of food for, and tend to the woundedness of others. My search for the epiphany that would free me from my need had failed because finding it would have meant losing my brother all over again. Accepting this, I did feel free. Or just liberated enough to recall what my questions and suspicions had often made me overlook:

  Giving can be pure, fucking joy.

  I was telling my friend Lynne how great it was, how freeing, finally understanding why I couldn’t stop giving, when Lynne blinked.

  “Why would you want to stop?” she asked.

  Well, what the hell, I thought. Why had I wanted to reject a trait that comforted, assisted, and inspired people, and that my best instincts pushed me to employ? Was it because the instinct was linked to my life’s worst tragedy? Or was it just fear—of being taken advantage of, of being naive or even sneakily self-serving?

  Some people see giving as a scam. They say it’s selfishness in altruistic clothing, masking givers’ real intent: making themselves look good, or their recipients beholden to them. Of course, I’d sometimes given for selfish reasons, to make this or that person think, Isn’t she great? Yet after years of parsi
ng my motives, I was sure: Far more often, my most selfish reason for giving was the lift it invariably gave me. Greedily, I pursued the fulfillment it offered. Hungrily, I embraced how it aligned me with God. Whether I was signing a check for earthquake victims, praising a beleaguered salesgirl’s smile, or letting a hurried deli patron in front of me in line, the person who felt most rewarded was me.

  But, hey, don’t believe me. Even science now acknowledges giving’s uplifting effects. More than its dictionary definition as “the transfer of items or actions from one person to another,” giving is the transfer of energy, of loving vibes that actually lower stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol in both the giver and the receiver while raising spirit-lifting endorphins.

  So giving is clearly much more than manipulation and penance. Yet too often I’ve kicked myself for it. Like during rush hour, when I’ve reduced my speed to let a stranger in the slow lane ease his car in front of mine—and he couldn’t be bothered to nod, wave, or otherwise acknowledge the courtesy. Once I’ve gotten over myself, once I’ve stopped looking for the automotive version of “Mom, we were pathetic without you!” I’ve recalled why I’ll never stop giving: Because it uplifts more often than it disappoints. Because it’s the right thing to do.

  Because, honest to God, there’s nothing like it.

  In 2005, my lissome twenty-three-year-old yoga teacher announced she was leaving town. My disappointment turned to astonishment when she asked, “Would you like to train to take over the class?” I was immensely flattered—until a thought plummeted me to earth: With this ass?

  I promptly found numerous other reasons to say “No, thanks”: Writing columns was enough of a high-wire act. Between home and work, my plate was too full to learn unfamiliar skills. Why would I voluntarily make a fool of myself—in Lycra? In truth, I was petrified. I had a choice: Give in to my fear or turn my off-and-on workout into a nonnegotiable commitment.

  I knew I’d chosen rightly each time I taught. Time after time, I was astounded that sharing this ancient discipline empowered me every bit as much as writing. I wasn’t “supposed” to teach yoga—which only added to my delight.

  Today, women confront countless life and career choices we weren’t “supposed” to have. They should scare us. Because no matter how much we deserve these opportunities, or whether we labor out of love or just for a paycheck, work challenges us differently from the way it does men, especially if we have kids. Can we admit this, stop pretending men’s and women’s concerns about work and family are identical? Real life isn’t like the Enjoli commercial I loved as a child, the one whose sexy heroine sang about bringing home the bacon, frying it up in the pan, and never letting her guy forget he’s a man. In real life, women’s dual devotion to both home and work isn’t a snap.

  My fear of teaching yoga was like the reluctance with which I approached every important piece of writing. Time after time, I wondered how I could bring clarity and wisdom to the work while tending to the myriad needs of a complex family and tumultuous home. How could anyone as tethered as I was create anything as ephemeral, as free, as art?

  Feared and constrained, my writing morphed into a separate entity, with a voice that asked, Where’s your support for me? Why are you so tempted to abandon this part of you? Finally, I would write, but not before realizing my craft was like my giving: loved and yet despised for the opposite directions in which it pulled me.

  I longed to immerse myself in the between. To dive into the tranquil stream that flowed between rejecting my writing and being subsumed by it, between the demands of my family and the cajoling of my craft. Floating on the silken waters where my warring aspirations met and smoothed out, I’d drift effortlessly in the stillness between my contradictory desires.

  Emptying myself for others while feeding the artist within.

  Millions of women might appreciate a cool dip in their between. Yet what I wanted was contradictory: To make peace with my fracturedness, to find closure about it—but a closure open-ended enough for me to rethink, feint, change. I wanted permission to honor, without guilt or remorse, the disparate claims made on me by family, job, and creativity while somehow remaining whole unto myself. When my search for the between became unremitting, I described it to other women who confessed similar yearnings, felt similarly ensnared in contradiction. Listening to them, I felt what always stirred beneath the video games, balls, and sports jerseys littering my male-strewn life:

  I love women.

  I always had, despite my early life having shaped me into a lover of men and a girl terrified by females’ power, including my own. Now, captivated by women and their countless acts of unheralded devotion, I longed to throw my arms around dozens whom I “knew” without ever having met: panic-stricken new moms at the mall shushing crying babies, fifty-somethings whose eyes avidly followed their oblivious teenage daughters, college-aged cuties whose offhand praise—“Great shoes!”—uplifted me. I wanted to throw a parade for Colleen, the furniture saleswoman who whispered as if she were in confession: “I have two jobs: Bloomingdale’s and home. My son is thirteen. Every night, my husband asks him if he has homework; he says, ‘No.’ I get home and know instantly he has bunches. I end up helping him. Women do things right, so we end up doing everything.”

  In my childhood history texts, the mythical Greek figure holding the world aloft was male. In truth, it was always a woman:

  The woman who gives sustenance of every kind to her family and to those she treats like family. The woman who sees beauty and brilliance in the child others would reject. The woman whose mate has died, dumped her, disappeared, or gone to war, who waits tables, takes over the company, pays the bills, raises the kids, handles every frigging thing in his absence. The woman whose grit, talent, and ingenuity compel her to make art, music, literature, peace, or, hell, just money, despite—or because of—others’ disapproval. The woman who refuses to sacrifice her life, her self, to marriage, men, or kids, and who instead enriches us all.

  Holding up the world—or one garden-variety family—isn’t easy. Women should celebrate their giving, revel in how it smoothes the way for others, while lifting them, the world’s most tireless givers, light-years above their human smallness. However misguided our offerings may be, what motivates them is often valid—and offers the answer to my question: “How do I honor myself and my need to give?

  Love.

  Love is the between. It’s the glue that binds a soul’s warring selves, the meeting place at which our opposites melt into and become part of each other.

  I turn to love in situations in which I once instinctually gave too much. Loving both my giving and myself, I decide, “This time, I’m giving to me.” Love is the voice that whispers to us that the separateness suggested by people’s genders, colors, and disparate backgrounds is an illusion. Underpinning women’s giving, it explains why the closer we get to others, the more we lose track of where their skin ends and ours begins.

  What else but love could make a species as dazzling and exalted as humanity resemble last night’s boring spaghetti? Left overnight in the fridge, this humblest of pastas becomes infinitely more memorable and delicious when warmed up the following day. People are like the sauce, vegetables, and noodles that share no likeness until mixed together. Marinate us in each other, and our differences melt and disappear, leaving us infinitely richer than we are in our separateness.

  It’s love—for spaghetti and the guys who adore it—that brought me back to the kitchen where my journey began. Two years after Skye stopped me in my tracks as I packed his lunch for chess camp, I was warming a pot of pasta as I chatted with a chess-loving friend on the phone about the queen in my son’s favorite board game.

  And I got stopped in my tracks all over again.

  “The lone female in chess, the queen is the game’s most dominant piece,” my friend was saying. The queen can move anywhere on the board and can capture any opposing piece in her way. Typical strategy says it’s unwise for a player to bring out
his queen too early because “a cluttered board makes her more vulnerable to entrapment,” she said.

  Wow. Hanging up, I asked Skye, two years taller and wiser, his take on chess’s queen. “She’s the most powerful piece, Mom,” he said, looking up from his homework. “But not necessarily the most important. Lose the king and you lose the game.”

  Kevin glanced up from his computer. “The queen is most important because she’s the most versatile,” he said. “She can go anywhere. She does everything.”

  To which I couldn’t help blurting, “No shit.”

  The only female on the cluttered chessboard of my home, I indeed do everything. My versatility is unmatched; I wield more power than I usually acknowledge or employ. I’ve used that power in the service and protection of others, especially my “king,” whether a husband, a son, a father, or a brother long lost to me.

  Yet mine needn’t be the rules-driven board game Skye went to camp to play. It took half a century, but I finally understood: My game is my own; I decide which rules or limitations to embrace. I determine when and where I move, how I play, whether to keep mining the past or to leap beyond it.

  Choosing different strategies will ensure different outcomes. And I can have fun. After all, it’s a game. Day by day, I can decide where the shifting balance of my love for myself, and my need to give to others, moves me: forward or sideways or diagonally or backward.

  Or between.

  Acknowledgments

  It’s hard for me to imagine this book existing without the support and encouragement of the following people:

  Mom, for surviving so much and still being the most alive person I’ve ever met. And Daddy, for having loved us in his own unique way.